Paolo Nutini channels more voices than the late Doris Stokes, and all of them were present at this one-off concert for Meltdown. The singer, still only 23, began inflected with Ray Charles, took in along the way in no particular order Bob Marley, Otis Redding, various blind Mississippi bluesmen, gestured toward Pete Seeger and the Proclaimers, and ended up in Spanish Harlem. It is a tribute to his own remarkable vocal possibilities that he can carry all of this off, and still sound just like himself. As somebody once said of Clive James, Nutini is a wonderful bunch of guys.

Backed by his irrepressible horn trio he sometimes seemed at pains to deliver several concerts all at once. Later this week Meltdown curator Richard Thompson will attempt 1,000 Years of Popular Music in 90 minutes or so. Nutini threatened to get there in a fraction of the time. The singing accent most often wanders from his native Livi Road in Paisley in the direction of the Caribbean – at times he sounds more Jamaican than Lord Kitch fresh off Windrush boat – but what he sacrifices in authenticity he makes up for in audacity.

He is, along the way, also capable of moments of proper intimacy. Candy is an otherworldly sound of infatuation, and his rendering of These Streets his delicate song of English exile, trembled with easy pathos. Nutini can't stay sombre for long, though. His patter tends to be less understandable than his patois – even the St Andrews cross bearing bravehearts were straining to catch his mumbled observations. Nobody seemed to mind much, though. Nutini has long learned that there is charm in inarticulacy. One phrase we did catch was "This is a song for upbeat people …" It might have applied to anything in the whole set. Even when he launched into "It takes a worried man to sing a worried song" Nutini gave every appearance of being the happiest man in the world, or certainly the sunniest Scot.